Nope. There is no limit to the resolution of reality, only of the instruments we use to measure it. So stop trying to make others accept your obscurantist idea that there's a limit to what there is to know.

Massive campaigns. for the clowns. I think you call them Political Action Committees.

Math can be trusted.

Yes, but not the people doing the math.

Invalid argument : reproducible results are reproducible."Making no sense" is a reproducible result.

Public data can be verified.

You can GIGO the same errors over and over.

Anything short of "free to know for everyone everywhere forever" has no place in public policy space.

Where's the torrent for this data? Oh, right... guess it "has no place in public policy space" then, eh?

What part of "public, open, free" don't you get? There are methods to verify data integrity and detect tampering.Fuck it, enshrine the measures in a blockchain to be sure. There, what "garbage in" now?As for garbage out, well no-one who'd publish anything based on that would have ANY credibility without disclosing at least enough to reproduce their results.

This should replace elections. And elected officials. Measure the real people's publicly-stated opinions and rule from that.

Replace all corrupted clowns chosen by rigged popularity contests with math. Math can be trusted. Public data can be verified. Anything short of "free to know for everyone everywhere forever" has no place in public policy space.

Reading the article helps. He was arrested for "downloading excessive material". In other words, he had a legal JSTOR account, he wasn't accessing it illegally, he just downloaded more material than they wanted him to. Really? That's a crime now?

Where were you when we went over this in all its gory detail? Yes, this is Slashdot and everything The Man does is evil, so I get the whole simplification thing. But the real situation was actually a bit complicated. He basically tried to download every article they had, which went beyond the terms of use of the service.

Fuck the terms of use. They're not LAW. If a law says they are, well, the terms of use of the license for the copyright on this post say that you have no right to read it in full. You must not read more than half of it. Even if it includes your words, you have no right to read below this line the first time. Or read above this line the second time.___________________________

His downloads impacted other users of the service at the time by slowing them down because - wait for it - he was trying to download everything and chewing up resources to do it.

So what? It's text. Text downloads fast. It's not like he coordinated a DDOS on JSTOR or anything.

His plan was to make all these articles available for free when access to them required a paid service.

The documents he planned to publish were public domain. Where were YOU when we discussed this at length?

He also hid the computer doing the work in a closet and took actions to hide his face from security cameras when going to the closet to check on his equipment. From a legal standpoint, this can be interpreted to mean he knew his actions were wrong.

LAWS DON'T MATTER. Reality matters. Victimless non-crimes have no reason to be prosecuted. This is self-evident.

There's a lot wrong with how the prosecutors handled this, but he was hardly some innocent school boy who got bullied for no reason.

They can't put everyone in prison. They can't raid every home. Let's botnet all the poorly-protected home routers in the world to slowly mine bitcoins and compute transactions : boom, billions of users worldwide to go raid in all jurisdictions of all civilized countries, tens of billions of attacks to trace down from dumb, dumb machines that don't log shit, to distributed attack tools that scramble all source and destination addresses, Hell on Earth for enforcement. This would make the Scientology vs. IRS swarm attack look like a playground dispute.

VAT doesn't affect international trade because it just doesn't apply there. That's a very, very profitable loophole : export over half your sales and the VAT office will pay you instead of the other way around. It's been abused in a lot of creative ways, and that's not going to stop, like, ever.

The effect on internal economy is to make a country poor. Can't have a rich country with poor people, and VAT diminishes buying power by its amount. Here in Belgium it's 21% on everything that's not food. Imagine having 21% of your income slashed down? And if your job is selling stuff, you get fucked twice : everything you sell (inside the country) is taxed on the end price, so you're fucked out of 21% of your list price, and then when you go buy stuff, you still get to pay everything at 1.21 times what it should cost.

Bitcoin is one of the very, very few truly resilient, truly p2p systems. There is no way to regulate it. All regulations on Bitcoin have to be hard-coded in the protocol spec, or else they're IMPOSSIBLE to enforce.

Bitcoin is the end of the world for governments. It's the money of the swarm. It's the Internet's native currency.

I read Slashdot quite a lot, and after 13 years of using Linux there has really never been an issue that can't be fixed or worked around with a little work. Reading the comments here and there, there and there about Linux I keep seeing posts from folks that seem to think Linux doesn't work. It works too well really. The real issue is that people are lazy and don't want to do work involved in setting up a system that works well.

It works well at some very precise points, and then breaks down.

When you get an iso of any distro, you can reasonably expect that it will work on any computer assembled before the release date. If it's reasonably good hardware, because the support for cheap shit tends to only begin to exist long after it stops being sold.

Reference designs like Sandy Bridge and other chips that go in $200+ boards, those are supported really well. But AMD chipsets? VIA? Well, if they're compatible enough with the PIIX3, sure, they'll work. As fast and well as an overclocked Pentium II, but they'll work.

Installing a distro that's not the latest, then trying to upgrade it, will fail. The probability rises with the age of the distro.

Like when you have a package that's, say, 0.9.2 and the current version is 1.2.x and it was supposed to upgrade from 0.9.x to 1.0.x then 1.1 then 1.2, and it breaks if you try to go from 0.9 to 1.1, let alone 1.2. This happens all the time in all non-trivial packages, like KDE and Portage, and also in little softs that glue other softs to cooperate, and begin to rot every time one of those glued softs get upgraded.

The main rub to me is neither OSX or WIndows works any better, and in fact Windows is still a steaming pile of junk suitable only for idiots. At least with Linux there isn't a compelling need to purchase anti-virus software, although you can install one if you'd like. I'm just not that paranoid. A lot folks try to install Linux on a machine that has DRM chips or other nasty stuff and then they try to blame the GNU side saying we all suck, the software sucks, and we're all a bunch of zealots that can't see how inferior our software is.

OSX doesn't... Did you ever use OSX?

It's as if someone took a UNIX, then made it work. Just Work. Do you realize that Hackintoshes now work better as desktop machines than any Linux? Apple has simply made UNIX usable.

With OSX, I NEVER have to even think to install a program. "Yeah but package managers" all suck. There is NO package manager on Linux that's quite serious enough to get its job done.They'd have to track everything. EVERY FILE. With checksums. They'd need a database full of metadata about the files they track. They'd have to include a parser for every last file in/etc, to track user-made changes and include those in the newer format or location. And stop searching for the same setting in three different locations. (Hi, Gentoo's Portage! Remember where is make.conf today?)

OSX : you get a folder that looks like a file an plop it in your/Applications. It's simpler than repositories full of programs that won't install, won't work or won't upgrade, on this precise configuration. Maybe Apple's AppStore gets that right, but I wouldn't know.

Just getting tired of seeing of those posts, because in all honesty it's hard to argue with a concept that delivers high quality, secure, and free (as in freedom), Operating systems whereby really all one has to do is a bit of work to get going full speed should any issues arise. I had one of those machines one time and it was a pain at times, however with the help of our friend Google, was able to work around the issue and get it stable. I guess it's just disturbing when people expect ZOMG awesome stuff for free and then also expect to not have to do any work... That's not the bargain. That's not the deal, and it never has been. I kind of hope it never becomes the deal either, because Linux is fun just like it is.:)

High quality, unless you need "up-to-date" as a criterion for that designation.Secure, yeah, not by default. All those stories of hacking always come down to one of three ways: 1. social engineering, 2. hardware theft, or 3. "but there was that setting, referenced in all Best Practices, that was stupidly forgotten amidst the trillion of others". Unsalted password databases? All the time. Misconfigured SSL? All of them. Is it really that hard? Apparently. So, Linux, secure? Yeah, the kernel is. The platform... not really more than others. (More than Windows, but joking about Windows Security is beating a dead horse with another dead horse. There is no security on Windows. There is no Windows Box that stays unpwned more than five minutes with a fast-enough pipe and a Metasploit more up-to-date than the box is. Or just one user on the Web and no adblock.)Free, yeah, as in "the freedom to fix this stupid bug", that you don't actually get. Ever tried to fix a bug in the source of a Gentoo package? I did, and gave up. No fucking way to inject my fix in the pipeline from the download from the repository to the binary install in the filesystem. I could have done it with enough time and effort - and it wasn't worth it. The only package where that's actually easy is the fucking kernel. Apparently, the easy way is to submit my fix to the upstream devs (wasting an hour setting up my box to hack on that, if I don't have the full toolchain to do so) and THEN wait for it to trickle back to me down the normal distro channel. Or just install the fixed version manually, just to confuse the package manager even more.Because it's so fun to fix.

Canonical is trying to get it right. And failing. Has been for years. Losing millions every year and forever. They're trying to re-code enough of the system to basically make it their OSX, but then they're still duplicating a ton of effort... Maybe they'll end up doing it right. Who knows, not me, I refuse to use Ubuntu since they stopped trying to make what exists work and went on to reinvent the wheel, poorly, twice, instead.

Yeah, so, one more sort-of-TOR, but with fixed servers in easy-to-raid locations.

They don't get it.

There is ONE way to make a REALLY resilient network. It's been proven over and over.

NO. CENTRAL. COMMAND.MESH EVERYTHING.ROUTE ERRYTHING BY DHTs.ALL NODES EQUAL PEERS. With the same capabilities. All nodes are routers. All nodes are relays. All nodes are bridges. All nodes are cell towers. Until we get rid of telcos/ISPs, all nodes are gateways, too.

Like TOR, but if everyone were a bridge and an exit relay and a cell tower.

THAT is unstoppable. Else there WILL be censorship and control and criminalization and destroyed lives like Aaron Swartz's.